Tag Archives: north america

It’s a balmy 14 degrees Celsius today as I pore through the grower’s catalogues and write of what’s new and what’s hot this spring for the next issue of the Gardener magazines. The snow is slipping down city drains and seeping into already unfrozen top soil. What a contrast with just four days ago, when the March wind tore holes in our coats and crept into our bones, causing the snow that had fallen and piled up in pillowy hills all week to drift and sting cheeks and block vision in accident-causing white-outs.

You can see the water melting and dripping from the roof.

And now this double digit, bud-swelling weather! If it freezes hard again, I shudder to think (as my mother used to say) what will become of our poor friends in the garden. The 14-day forecast, though, shows this unusually warm weather continuing.

Perhaps I should go outside to cut some branches of forsythia in case the emerging buds get frozen off. At least that way, I can watch them bloom in a vase of water indoors. Forsythia is chancy here in Manitoba where late frosts can nip the blossoms of many woody plants.

Daylight savings time came to North America last night, at 2 a.m., and startled me to wakefulness at what would normally be five o’clock this morning, even though the clock said six. I rise every Sunday at this hour to prepare for my weekly garden show on CJOB. The lines were largely silent this morning as even the most ardent gardeners ignored the clock and slept until the accustomed hour.

My guest, Carla Hyrcyna, and I had fun just the same. We talked about all the exciting new plants coming on stream this year – well, not new, but exciting in their variations. The growers have been very busy this past few seasons improving on improvements. Now we have double everything, even cosmos, surely the quintessential single flower, a thing of perfection in itself. We have double poppies and double echinacea and double-double cosmos, not to mention double zinnias and double petunias and double impatiens. And now we even have double osteospermum, for heaven’s sake!

To me the beauty of osteospermum was its brilliant, highlighted blue centre. I don’t see the point of doubling that up and making it look like one of those absurd Easter Bonnet type echinaceas (remember when echinaceas were actually called purple coneflower? They are everything but purple now – white, yellow, orange, red, pink, green . . .).

Still, all these variations intrigue me and I will no doubt buy and plant all sorts of these eye-candies this spring. Carla has just come back from Europe, Germany actually, where she saw some exciting things. She was impressed with the use of orange-scarlet blossoms with black florals and with the fluorescent cactus and eye-popping succulents. I’m still trying to get my head around black petunias!

Glenn is home now. They let him out of hospital on Feb. 24 and the first two weeks were pretty rough for him, but he is slowly mending and gathering strength for the battle still to come.

At the office, Ian is filled with spring fever, dying to get into the greenhouse and begin planting seeds. He has visions of hanging baskets filled with edibles such as cucumbers and beans, which he will hang in my garden. We are going to do an access show on Shaw TV this summer – 13 weeks of ideas to fill. I am sure this will be one of them.

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Dorothy Dobbie: the Gardening Canuck

The way the light falls on a leaf, the passing of a shadow as a bird interrupts the sun, the way the sky is reflected in our pool -- this blog is about those sorts of things.
It is also about the many fascinating things I have learned as I have meandered through my garden (and the gardens of countless others) in pursuit of stories for my garden magazines and in researching my weekly e-letter, "10 Neat Things".
I am endlessly enchanted with the quite awesome world of plants and the outdoors.